Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 20, 2011 @03:09PM
from the drei-ist-genug dept.

teh31337one writes "AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stocks. Press release here." Gripes one anonymous reader: "Americans will have even less choice now when it comes to cell phone carriers. Say good-bye to the one that had the best customer service and was most friendly towards Android and rooting."

Not bad from where I stand. We have too many carriers, and I'd like to see US Cellular get absorbed next. Fewer carriers means more revenue for the remaining ones, and thus more money for upgrades. Also, fewer competing towers = less wasted infrastructure.

Right, because we all know that's what happened when AT&T merged with Cingular. Oh, wait, you say that the service got a lot worse when that happened? How could that possibly be, I mean it's not like AT&T would use the gains in efficiency to line its pockets while providing substandard service.

Around here the problem is a lack of providers. I'd like to sign up with US Cellular, but they aren't available here. Around here we've got Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. I think that Boost might be a

ATT recently bought (well a few years ago) centennial wireless. Everything was great until the last few months (for me the last 3 weeks). I'm not sure what they are doing, but areas where I used to get 5 bars (that were not att areas but centennial wireless areas) I now get 2 or 3 bars. Calls are being dropped in areas where I used to have the best service. Everyone I know who used to use centennial wireless is having the same problems. No signal, droppped calls, etc.

I've been a long time ATT customer, but I'm thinking it's time for a change if this doesn't' improve in the next 5 months.

I'm thinking it's time for a change if this doesn't' improve in the next 5 months.

To me, this is the travesty of mobile phone/data service in the U.S.: Our mobile-phone market has been divvied up between the big players, and we're all locked into contracts that cost more than a new car to escape from.

And now we have one fewer choice.

And unlike US Cellular, T-Mobile was a legit nationwide carrier.

Guess I better learn to accept the Verizon shaft or prepare to deal with the overall crappyness of AT&T.

> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.

You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.

> No, but if I did, I would be able to sue the grocery store for violation of their contract, as you can with the cellular companies if the service they're providing is suddenly sub-par and vastly inferior to its conditions at the start of the contract.

You almost certainly can't--read your contract. You can go to arbitration. Which you will lose.

You can always sue somebody. If the court finds them guilty of violating their contract, then the arbitration clause doesn't matter.

AT&T should be broken up, not made larger. This is a disaster for the future of cellular communications, wireless internet and telecommunications generally.

Time to start writing congress people and threatening to send money to their opponents if they don't put pressure on the Justice Department and the Commerce Committee to stop this. That has a surprising effect on them. Nothing else seems to do anything, but they get nervous when people say they're going to send money to their opponents.

Ideally, yes. In practice, not so much. The problem with that is, CEO's like new yachts more than they like happy customers.

The real problem is that idiots keep applying economic models that assume strong competition to markets that are natural monopolies.

The right way to do all of this is to create a nonprofit organization in each city whose job it is to install last mile fiber between every building in the city and a central office or two. It doesn't need to operate any switching equipment whatsoever. All it does is put fiber in the ground between all the buildings in an area and a single central location. Then competing ISPs can lease fiber that goes to specific customer premises and rackspace in that central office, all for cost, and hook into the internet through a series of competing inter-city backbone providers like Level 3 and AT&T. Then each individual ISP can decide questions like monthly fees, network neutrality, flat rate or per-bit pricing, etc., but in a highly competitive market since all it takes to start an ISP is to buy some switching equipment for a couple grand and rent some space in the central office.

You give the nonprofit some basic rules to follow (like percent coverage with fiber by such-and-such date, redundancy, up-time, etc.) and then you give the nonprofit's executives bonuses inversely proportional to the amount of money they spend in meeting the specified requirements. The idea is to take the specific thing which is a natural monopoly, namely the last mile connection, separate it into a single-purpose organization that operates with no profit and let competition operate as much as possible for all other parts of the operation. Now, can we please do this?

You take your nonprofit organization and provide it some spectrum and enough capital to build a couple of towers and the fiber between the tower and the central office. The fiber goes to a switch in the central office where any wireless ISP can hook up for their share of the maintenance cost of the tower. Then you do constant live spectrum dutch auctions: You allocate a tiny piece of the spectrum for a control channel and then split the rest into slices of e.g. 5KB/sec each and auction them off at e.g. 2 second intervals. Then anybody who wants to use wireless transmits a message on the control channel that says "I want three slices for the next 2 seconds, I bid $0.0004/slice/second" and the tower either responds with a message saying which frequencies to transmit on or denying the request because the requesting device has been outbid. If there are more available slices than there are bidders then everybody gets what they want and nobody pays anything, if there are more bidders than slices then the highest bidders win and each one pays the amount per slice that the lowest winning bidder pays.

The result is that if there is sufficient capacity then everything is free, if there is contention (and to the extent there is contention), the nonprofit collects revenue. The revenue then goes to buying more spectrum or building more towers to alleviate the capacity shortfall. It's like magic -- a direct connection between supply and demand. How's that for free markets?

The above commenter almost certainly works for one of the recent "reputation management" companies that work to subvert online communities from discussing stories that may reflect badly on very big companies. This particular UID was created a few days ago to perform a similar function in a story with the headline "Time Warner Cable Cuts iPad Live TV Access 50%". The tactic is to create a very large section of long, useless trolling comments at the very beginning of the comments section made up of a lot of anonymous idiocy broken up by idiocy from registered users, almost always very recently registered.

I've seen this tactic used on a lot of stories that always seem to be about some very very large corporation, sometimes on the very same stories reported at other websites with large and active commenter communities. I'm not exactly sure how the technique would work, but it's too widespread and too uniform to be anything but an organized effort. You even see variations on the same user names in different social networking and discussion-based websites.

I know for a fact that companies like New Media Strategies and all the "Reputation Defender" and reputation.com companies that have recently sprung up are not shy about using some very disruptive and underhanded tactics to try to achieve their goals for their clients, and will sometimes even brag to their clients about their techniques. I know someone who worked for one of these outfits and the stories he would tell are pretty disgusting. And these companies are very richly capitalized. There's a lot of money in obfuscation it seems. Corporations do not want us to know what they are up to.

Information is already often untrustworthy. We either have to find a way to thwart these efforts or we have to speed development of ad hoc networks on a large scale. If there's not going to be meaningful net neutrality, then we're going to have to do it ourselves.

By the way, AT&T buying T-Mobile is a terrible development. We can hope that the Justice Department steps in and stops this, but they've been pretty soft on anti-trust. AT&T should not be getting bigger, they should be getting broken up. We will all lose on this deal.

As much as this is a truly bad thing, there is one area where this will lead to greater efficiency...network coverage. Both AT&T and T-Mobile customers who previously had poor service in certain areas will, once everything is integrated, get better service in those areas. It will take a while before AT&T can let the network stagnate to the point where the service sucks again.

Sooo... from my experience, Verizon Wireless is deplorable and despicable in their customer service and billing practices, respectively. I've heard from family members that AT&T has some ugly issues, but I haven't experienced them personally. My impression is that T-Mobile is the best of the three, and my experience with them has been better-than-average service and coverage, and consistent accuracy in billing.

I'd love to hear people's experiences with other providers, so I have somewhere to go when T-M

No, you will continued to be serviced by t-mobile folks locked away in some far corner of customerservicelandia.

I used to be an AT&T Wireless customer who was then gobbled up by Cingular who was then gobbled up by AT&T. I was still, however on my old AT&T Wireless account/plan. Every time I would call and talk to someone, they would eventually stop and "Oh, sorry, you're one of those old AT&T Wireless customers. I need to transfer you. And yeah, you're right, I can't offer you a better plan.

As a former AT&T customer and a current T-Mobile customer, I am very disappointed by this. However, the deal is still a year away and subject to regulatory approval.Perhaps we can hope that the government makes a move to protect consumers for a change?

Surely AT&T could fix up their own network for less than the cost of T-Mobile.

This acquisition isn't about subscribers or network equipment. AT&T is spending $39B to purchase T-Mobile's frequency spectrum in the US so that they can ensure that they have enough spectrum to roll out LTE and continue to upgrade their 3G HSPA+ network. Any subscribers that opt to stay with AT&T post merger is just an added benefit to them.

The only people who will benefit from this are the executives. They'll lay off tens of thousands and stick the money in their own pockets. Plus millions of customers who fled AT&T's fucking horrible network are now going to be forced to give them even more unearned money (at least in early termination fees). The bigger the crime, the safer the crook.

Of course, some will claim that this will help AT&T's network. That a dollop of shit in a glass of wine is wine, not shit. Bottoms up!

People who follow cell phone plans closely (crazy as they are) usually get excited about changes in privacy policies, etc, as it gives a window to change carriers without suffering Early Termination Fees. However, merging itself might not be enough, as the hybrid carrier is likely to continue to maintain both sets of contracts for existing customers.

Me too. I loathe AT&T and avoided getting an iPhone for years because I didn't want to have an account with them. I wasn't crazy about T-mobile's signal strength at my house, but stuck with them because my phone bill was so low. I just bought a Nexus S last week and then this happens. I'm so unhappy. This is most definitely NOT going to improve either prices or service for communications in the United States.

The situation for Internet service to my home office is even worse. There is literally only

I am in the same boat as you are. I was an AT&T customer for 6.5 years and then switched to Tmobile after a huge F'up by AT&T (should've taken them to the courts). If this deal goes through, I am going to Verizon. No way in hell will I ever be an AT&T customer.

SBC Communications (formerly Southwestern Bell) bought them in 2005 and renamed themselves AT&T since the name was already better known (as a source of overwhelming evil, sure, but still, better market recognition is better market recognition).

Whats funny is AT&T had to divest itself of some markets when AT&T Wireless and Cingular merged. Most of those markets were bought up by SunCom... which T-Mobile bought to increase coverage. I wonder if they will have to divest those markets again.

I gave up hope on the mobile industry in the US long ago. When T-Mobile and AT&T couldn't even use compatible frequencies for 3G, the hope of cross carrier compatibility died a long time ago. GSM is only great when you can buy an unlocked phone, choose a provider and pop in a SIM, then change on a whim while paying lower monthly prices due to the lack of a subsidy. This is one of the many benefits Europeans enjoy, along with good roaming agreements to ensure they can make a call even if their own provider doesn't cover the area well. I still look back to 2004 when I had an unlocked Sony Ericsson phone from T-Mobile that I used in Europe for a bit. Bought a SIM in London, traveled into the Netherlands, around Germany and a bit into Switzerland. At one point, my phone saw 9 different providers it was willing to use for emergency calls, and 4 or so of those it was willing to roam on for everything else.

Since none of those benefits ever came to the US, I hold some hope in that this merger will bring some good. AT&T is pledging a bigger LTE rollout, including to rural parts of the US. This is desperately needed, as many rural areas have dial up and satellite based options only. Dialup is near unusable these days, and satellite adds too much latency, negating benefits from Web 2.0 based sites, and conferencing/communication software. Low caps also prevent rural users from taking advantage of services like Netflix.

We had been with Centennial Wireless for years, until they were bought out by a combination of AT and T and Verizon. Our region went to Verizon. Thus, as we have to be on a GSM network, we were faced with a choice between AT and T and T-mobile. We went with T-mobile, as AT and T are notoriously unreliable around these parts. T-mobile also offered a much better deal and great prices on great phones. However, if the AT and T and T-mobile deal goes through, we will have no alternatives. The reason we require b

Actually, if you have a 3G/UMTS phone that uses normal international frequencies, they now work in Japan as well. I've used a Nokia E61, Sony-Ericsson K600i and will be taking my N8 with me on the next trip.
Also, T-Mobile had much better (still exorbitant, though) international roaming rates.

We went with T-mobile, as AT and T are notoriously unreliable around these parts.

It's not like the T-Mobile towers will be taken down by a cackling AT&T. If you get good reception now, you should continue to get good reception as AT&T also starts using the local T-Mobile towers... in fact I see that as being the one bright spot here, that the GSM network towers across the country are combining and this should really help customers of both carriers get better reception (and AT&T customers get be

I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer for 8 years, and I've NEVER regretted the move for a single second.

I pay $50 a month for nation-wide no roaming coverage, 500 texts, IM, international calling, 600 free anytime minutes and free nights and weekends. NOBODY has a deal as good as that for what you get. Not Verizon, not AT&T, not Sprint...nobody.

I loved that T-Mobile would sign contracts with "small fry" to extend their coverage to areas previously untouched. When I moved, my cellphone said "Sun-Com" for nearly 2 years, but I never paid a penny more. They finally put a T-M tower in my area, and service has been outstanding!

That's what I am considering as well. My contract runs out around the time this deal is scheduled to close, so I wouldn't have any ETFs to worry about. The question now is, are there any decent prepaid GSM carriers in Georgia, that also offer good 3G data rates?

Virgin mobile is half that price, with unlimited internet for your smartphone and no contracts. I used to be a T-mobile customer until I realized it wasn't really that great of a deal. I've found sprint's network (which is what virgin uses) to have better coverage than T-mobile as well.

With AT&T being the only GSM carrier in the US, manufacturer agreements will be way easier and, thus, we'll finally be getting a vast selection of high-end phones. (T-Mobile has been steadily improving in this front.)

HOPEFULLY AT&T customers will get UMA (GAN), probably one of T-Mobile's best and most exclusive features. They would be incredibly short-sighted to throw that technology away.

One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.

While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years. Sprint has been losing customers for a while now and their WiMAX technology isn't taking off fast enough. I hope the FCC does something to control the monopolies that will ensue when that happens. This should get interesting really quickly.

# With AT&T being the only GSM carrier in the US, manufacturer agreements will be way easier and, thus, we'll finally be getting a vast selection of high-end phones. (T-Mobile has been steadily improving in this front.)

Again, good luck with that. AT&T offers iPhones, what else do you want? You don't want that commie Android system do you?

# HOPEFULLY AT&T customers will get UMA (GAN), probably one of T-Mobile's best and most exclusive features. They would be incredibly short-sighted to throw that technology away.

The main reason I like T-Mobile. I can travel internationally and pay for calls as if I were still in the USA.

A switch to GSM is irrelevant.All carriers will switch to LTE, which, right there in the name, is the long term evolution for GSM/UMTS.

What does this mean to you?Simple. Sprint (after they switch to LTE),Virizon and ATT will all be on the same tech.Of course, you will say that they are on separate bands. So what. Nearly all phones which you buy will support ALL implemented LTE bands. It wont matter a bit where you are with LTE>Basically, US is getting on board with the rest of the planet. Well..all but Japan who will stay with Nttdocomo version of LTE.Still ATT does suck for customer service and stealing your money.But hey...You guys in the US dont appear to give a fuck about what your elected officials do, so dont start crying when shit happens.

Americans will have even less choice now when it comes to cell phone carriers. Say good-bye to the one that had the best customer service and was most friendly towards Android and rooting.

All I can say is - at least it wasn't Verizon. I left them for T-Mobile a number of years ago, specifically because of bad customer support and absurd restrictions (such as not letting you use a phone's Bluetooth capabilities to upload your address book and calendar).

Jesus. The amount of anti-capitalism smugness in these comments is amazing.

Look, the US telecom market is about as far from the free market as you can get. The carriers get massive privileges in the form of land usage. They get massive amounts of tax breaks and subsidies, not to mention innumerable perks from local governments. To top it all off, the carriers don't even have to compete in an open market; the wireless spectrum is a heavily-licensed, extremely expensive, very limited resource doled out by

Real capitalism would be great. A real free market would be great. In the meantime, the people running large and influential piles of concentrated "capital" are bitching constantly about "freedom" while limiting everyone else's freedom as fast as they can.

AT&T buying up the only other provider of GSM service in the country is a perfect example. For another example, note the generally available ROI on retail "capital investments".

Funny how T-Mobile is an underdog in the US and people seem to actually like them there (or hate them less than the competition). At home they're the ex-monopoly. They have the highest prices and the most civil-servant like customer service.

They must be a different company in the US or the telecommunications sector is abysmal in the US.

It's the abysmal telecommunications sector. Around here I've got 5 choices, 3 of them would require me to buy a new phone, and only T-Mobile and AT&T allow the use of random phones with a SIM. Sprint won't activate a phone that doesn't have it's logo silk screened on it, and none of the major providers competes for anything other than being somewhat less sucky than the others and depending upon inertia to carry them through.

It's been getting progressively worse over the years. Even with GSM, AT&T uses a different portion of the spectrum for 3G than T-Mobile does, meaning that there's going to be a lot of people without 3G or having to buy new phones prematurely if this goes through.

Being as T-Mobile's reception sucks massively in many parts of the country, this can only be an improvement in call duration and quality for existing T-Mobile customers. I am a T-Mobile customer currently and look forward to perhaps finally dropping less than half of my calls in an average week. Maybe if I'm really, really, lucky, I'll even get decent reception at my house (where they have claimed 3 bars for years).

Besides, T-Mobile has generally been a niche player in the US market in comparison to the number of customers on any other network.

The problem with the US cell phone market is that there is not enough competition, and competition is stymied by technical incompatibilities and bad contracts. This merger won't make things any worse.

What really needs to be done is more regulation to allow a competitive market to function: all handsets must work on all carriers, customers need to be able to switch any time without penalties, and nebulous phone subsidies should be prohibited (carriers can still offer zero percent interest financing on phones, but the prices need to be transparent).

Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.

This is bad. As a t-mobile customer I'm going to be awfully sad the day I have to give up my unlimited tethered internet. Sprint is looking like the only real option left and I really detest the $10 smartphone tax just on fucking principle.

The promise of unlimited wireless internet is looking bleaker and bleaker by the day.

Except that the two carriers use two different bands for 3g data and T-Mobile customers could already roam on AT&Ts network, but at edge only speeds.

Actually, you can only roam when you are in an area without native coverage. So if T-mobile serves your area (but with spotty coverage), and an AT&T tower gives you a better signal, you can't roam to the AT&T tower.

Sure. All you need is enough money to hire some professional networkers, buy the right of way to lay fiberoptic cables across at least a good part of one state, rent or buy land on which to place your cell stations, buy a licence to a block of spectrum from the FCC (Which alone will easily top a billion dollars - that spectrum is in very high demand) and then operate the whole expensive infrastructure until you have enough customers to break even. All while fending off every legal trick the incumbents have

I've heard good things about Boost mobile, but the CDMA carriers have their own issues, like Sprint refusing to activate phones which don't have their insignia on them, even if the phone is the same model that they normally allow.

Boost = Sprint. There are only 4 (now 3) real carriers in the US. ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. The rest are subsidiaries, virtual providers etc. There are only 2 technologies CDMA and GSM which only GSM is an Internationally used standard and thus preferred by business. So businesses and people with any intention of traveling frequently are now forced to get AT&T while before you could go with certain handsets on T-Mobile (T-Mobile's frequencies for eg. 3G and EDGE are NOT according to standards).

As a Canadian, I think we are in no position to pity or criticize our neighbours. Our media and telecom industries are in some ways even more integrated and oligopolistic than our neighbours' equvialents. Most of the private terrestrial broadcasters happen to be owned, in whole or in part, by the same companies that own what are known as "broadcast distribution undertakings" - basically, the cable, satellite, and IPTV providers. Several also own digital pay TV channels, cellular and landline telecom provide

Too bad you posted as anon or I'd have modded you insightful. I've got a tracphone and I love it. I pay for what I use when I use it. No bill. No aggravation. Coverage is through at&t towers which gives me a great coverage area but no data and if someone texts me I just ignore it, I only pay if I read it. For 40 bucks I get 400 minutes which lasts between one and three months depending on what is going on at the time. It's not for those pitiful people that live with a bluetooth headset grafted on